My left foot

Here's one of Margot's photos of irises on Ella Street and me waiting patiently and not quite out of view in the background ...

Gardener's Arms

With the University just a short walk down the road this place is very much a favourite with the academic (and perhaps not so academic) crowd. It's usually full to the brim and overflowing at lunch times. Along with this sunny beer garden there's also pool tables and no fewer than 17 TVs (blimey!) all showing sport, sport and more sport!!! (how nice...)

Fat Larry's as was

Fat Larry's if I remember right sold second hand CDs and that sort of stuff a few years back. This corner block including the shop next door was known as Pools Corner selling anything second hand, TVs, bikes, furniture and lots of  fishing gear as I recall. They ran a cheque cashing scheme as well. I may have bought a TV from there many, many years back (I've checked with Margot and yes we did, says herself, it was the one that went pink! Hmm.). Well Fat Larry is long gone and Pools Corner is now Ella Street Social Club.

One flew over the Crow's Nest

Outside this Italian restaurant on Newland Avenue was parked the smallest delivery van I've ever seen. This place was a year or so ago called La Perla, new name, new decor and it's getting good reviews. I've seen the menu and like all these places it's far from cheap for what is essentially pasta with some sauce on top. Thirty years ago this was a greasy spoon of a place by the name of the Crow's Nest (if I remember me rightly) it specialised in bacon butties and tea served in a pint mug! Autres temps, autres goûts! 

Keep focused

Oops!

Astonished brickwork

Ella Street (or at least its residents' association) has a thing about birds, there are bird tables along the length and little model birds attached to street furniture, I've posted about this a while back (here). What I didn't know then but have found since is that this avian fix has extended to putting up little quotes from literature with a birdy theme. Various authors from Wordsworth to Poe were chosen. Anyhow this being Hull and reason being what it is I suppose they could not escape the Larkin effect. At least this is one of his more cheery verses, yes I know it's difficult to believe. 

And while I'm on about old baldy, some of you may recall the fibre glass toads that decorated the town a while back on the celebration (there is no better word for it) of his death some 25 years earlier, well wait five years and suddenly it's thirty years since his death and a reunion of toads is planned this year along with a very large inflatable toad to hang over the town centre. You know a dead Larkin is the gift that keeps on giving ... It's a culcher thing, innit!

This is on the wall of the Jewish cemetery at the far end of Ella Street and close by that delight of modern architecture that I posted the other day .

You want the whole picture and the whole poem? Surely you do, it's really not that long, honest.

Coming 

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon—
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

Philip Larkin

A stylish exit

Living near the large cemetery and crematorium on Chanterlands Avenue means funeral cortèges are a common sight in these parts. Most involve black limousines but I've noticed a worrying trend lately for grey hearses (!); this will never do. A few, very few, involve the old style horse drawn hearse like this one that clip-clopped slowly along Cottingham Road yesterday; a fine if, as I suspect, expensive send off.